This paper will consider the figure of the “patron au dedans” or “invisible censor within” in Woolf's writing. It will show that Woolf's interrogatory practice may be seen as both internal soliloquy and as dialogical; she is in constant debate with the “invisible presences” (MOB 92) who constantly check and verify the writing self. I will propose that, in a sketch written for the Hyde Park Gate News, the thirteen year old Virginia was experimenting with the dialectical processes inherent in composition: writing and reading; creating and editing; producing and marketing.

Creation is a contradictory process. A distinguished novelist once told me that teaching her insatiable creative writing students was like breastfeeding twenty-four babies. Their voracity led to some musing as we considered a Kleinian “good breast-bad breast” model for this analogy. Teachers know the contradictions implicit in the task. We support and praise but, concurrently, we have the contrary task of being critical; we have to censure and check.

Throughout her memoirs, diaries and letters there is a sense of Woolf perpetually observing the workings of her own mind; conversing with her self about composition and the editing process. She distinguishes “a spectator in me who…remained observant, note taking for some future revision” (MOB 155). Woolf knows that a degree of autonomy has been achieved when one is able to step back to better observe one's self. In her 1924 essay “Montaigne,” she writes: “The man who is aware of himselfis henceforward independent” (E4 73). As Judith Allen demonstrates in Virginia Woolf and the Politics of Language (2010), both Montaigne and Woolf “were intensely interested in what ensues when one brings one's self, in all its mystery and mutability, to meet another self” (17).

The crucial instruction in Woolf's “Montaigne” to “Observe yourself“ (E4 74) has, by the end of the essay, become more urgent. “Observe yourself” is substituted by “Observe her” and the imperative is repeated four more times, finishing with “Observe, observe perpetually.” Woolf personifies the soul in an inner room “as she broods over the fire” (E4 72). The self and the soul are not unified; we watch the soul “with absorbed interest,” it becomes “an enthralling spectacle” (E4 78).